So, the major announcement is now, finally, made. Black Blade Publishing will be handling Swords & Wizardry products. I thought I'd go into a bit more depth about it, in case anyone worries about what the effect will be on this site and on the nature of the resources being produced for the game.

Now that everyone knows BBP is going to be the publisher, I think that will allay any concerns about the project becoming more commercial. Grodog and Tacojohn are fixtures in the old school community - even though they both have extensive contacts in the more mainstream gaming areas, everything they've done has been 1e or before. They offer the opportunity to build into the mainstream, but this is their main project, not the stepchild of a Pathfinder or 4e product line.

This website will remain the discussion center for S&W, and it's still run by me. Since this deal lets me be much more "just a fan of the game," I'll have a chance to participate more in the gaming discussions instead of focusing on all the details of producing resources. The website will still be a place where the project can produce resources; the benefit is that instead of going through lulu, we can just boost the resources to Black Blade. In terms of the project's warchest, the resources produced here through this site will still flow through as much money into the project as they did through lulu. In the case of printed materials, the project will actually do better than with lulu.

I am still maintaining the warchest for the project, since Mythmere Games will be doing lots of promotional activities for the game, and in the case of several products we are also printing them and getting the risk/reward benefit. That was at my request, since I wanted to leave some areas in which I had complete control and other areas where I could just hand the hassles over to Jon and Allan and spend my time writing.

Basically, this deal allows me to spend my time on what I'm good at (organizing production, writing, organizing support for events) and leave the things I'm bad at to Allan and Jon (stopping and thinking, handling money sensibly, doing promotions and advertising, etc). Trying to handle the administrative side of this project was sapping my creative energy and taking a lot of the fun out of it. Allan and Jon enjoy the administrative side of it, and more power to them.